Girls, be Good: Omnibus Novel

abroad.

PROLOGUE

Dear Director Sager,

Please accept my resignation from the post of investment manager as final and irrevocable.

Before I get to the point, I would like to remind you of the short chronology of events related to my career in our company over the last several years.

It all started back on 25 December 1989, exactly on Christmas Day, when, at a short meeting at the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Serbia, formerly SFRY, I presented a prototype of a toy which, we all assumed, would be all the rage in the future globalized world. As manager of new investments, I had given up spending the holidays with my family in order to foist a small plush lemur on minor conceited apparatchiks of an anti-democratic, quasi-socialist decaying system. The lemur had flown in from Boston, picked me up here in Frankfurt, and together we went to Belgrade, the Ottoman-European town its residents love to call a city. If you remember, and I am sure you do remember quite well, the mass production of our plush toy was supposed to begin two years after that meeting, at a plant of the first German-Yugoslav toy factory to be built in Pančevo. The Ministry was supposed to issue a certificate stating that the product was useful for the education of children at an early school age, which would exempt us, as investors, from most taxes and put us on the same level with the then state-run companies in terms of privileges and subventions. In order to achieve this, I had to take the secretary general of the Ministry of Education, a certain Dragan Milanović, out to dinner. That dinner, let me remind you, cost us over thirty thousand Deutsche marks. At that time, offering a bribe was considered to be a wise business move. I was even given a pay raise for the success. I am sure you can remember this, as well.

We, self-proclaimed creative economists, planners, entrepreneurs, politicians, we all rely on statistics and research, on experts’ projections. Despite this, we are always necessarily optimistic. It seems to me today, I am certain, that being objective and being an optimist at the same time is actually an oxymoron, something like being a Christian Democrat, since, you’ll concede, we don’t follow research and objective indices, but we want research and objective indices to follow us and our hormonal or suchlike ambition, or a consequence of an early frustration of ours. I am convinced we don’t invest in the world so it becomes better, worthier and richer, so that our investment pays off, but we make the world a better, worthier and richer place because, for some reason unbeknown to us, we wish, we feel a need to invest in it. I know, my director, that it is no use lamenting over spilled beer but, you tell me, who would have thought that everything would be fucked up so spectacularly? Nobody. Neither you nor me.

Unfortunately, two years after the above-mentioned meeting in Belgrade, we witnessed a total collapse. Only the zero series of small big-eyed plush monkeys designed by the American hit-making JoyToy studio came out of the factory plant. Our strategic planners advised us to start with a female version of the lemur, intended for girls, as in focus groups they more easily fell for hit toys with no sign of new technology. This is why the zero series had a pink tail and made-up eyelids with which female lemurs would blink with each movement up or down. Male lemurs would follow only after six months.

Right after our spectacular beginning, the war broke out in Yugoslavia, and as a consequence of the sanctions we abandoned that market, and the lemur zero series, universally but pretentiously ironically called Aya, was on sale throughout Europe and the Mediterranean countries of Africa and the Middle East. Thanks to that idiot of a woman from the marketing department, the advertisement was utterly wrong or good for nothing. The sales were, despite the affordable price, disappointing, to put it mildly. We moved the production to the Czech Republic and there we made a boom with luminous sound-emitting plastic swords and R2-D2 robots.

The factory in which I placed so much trust had been closed down even before it started operating at full capacity. My lemurs were soon forgotten. No-one thought about them and I myself attempted to erase them from my mind. But it didn’t work. The failed investment worth two million marks was my direct fault. I should have seen where the things were heading for. I should have seen what and where I invested. You generously forgave me this loss because of my previous successes and new promising plans, for which I am grateful to you, but I must say I have never forgiven myself. My motivation for work has, together with my lemurs, gone to the dogs.

Dear director, this is why I decided to resign from the post of investment manager and to move to my parents’ village near Eslohe. A relative of mine will find me a convenient small property. I’ll have a garden and a dog. I’ve had enough of everything. Life is too big for me at this time, it goes over my head. I have to carry out a tactful withdrawal for two or three years, while there’s still time, and after that, who knows. I’ll say it once again – this decision is final and irrevocable. I give up my right to severance pay and compensation for the unused vacation days.

The years spent working with you have been nice and difficult, as life itself. Take care.

Kristian Adler,

Former new investment manager

Kristian had written his resignation letter for the third time. He wasn’t happy at all with the arbitrary tone and informal manner of address, but he couldn’t do otherwise. He decided this was it. He put the paper in the envelope and left the envelope on the director’s desk. He went outside. He walked down Kaiserstrasse trying not to think, possibly for the first time in the last few years, about irresistible pink-tailed lemurs. As he was further away from his company’s headquarters with each step, he managed to eliminate them, at moments, from his conscience.

He didn’t even suspect that the zero series – the entire small army of lively tiny pop-eyed plush animals had been taken over by a force larger than any manager, any company and any country, that lemurs were ready, at a signal, to be deployed to any position in any world, to carry out any mission assigned to them.

And their mission was larger than this world.

1 LEMUR THE FIRST AND THE LAST

BELGRADE (TANJA MILANOVIĆ, 8 years old)

December 1989

An old man holds out his hand. A hand is held out by itself. The doctor with earpieces on places the cuff of a blood pressure meter around his upper arm. The old man doesn’t change the expression on his face. The systolic pressure acceptable. The diastolic pressure elevated, but still acceptable. This is only a procedure, after all. The figure of a man in a dark blue coat close by. The man’s head cannot be seen. There’s a television in the background. A gray screen with no moving images. The old man is sitting on a white metal hospital bed. The old man first looks at the doctor, pleadingly, then at the headless man, which spices up his pleadings with fury. Everything turns into surrender.

A woman is concerned. A thin old woman with a colorful silk scarf around her head walks to and fro. Like she is thinking, making decisions. Something between a peasant woman and a townswoman. Drained by vigor, attitude. With no make-up on. Her scarf is tucked into her fur-collar coat. It looks expensive, unlike everything else. A princess – a witch.

The old man and the woman together, in front of a low wooden piece of furniture, stare at one spot, as if avoiding seeing anything, anyone. Then they look, though. He, then she. It’s not them as individuals that look, but hatred, helplessness, something that reminds of hope.

Now the two of them are sitting. At the same place where they stood, only now they are sitting on simple chairs in front of an even simpler table. Punished kids at a much too small desk in a corner. His left elbow and her right one are leaned on the smooth surface of the table so as to provide a semblance of nonchalance toward the moment. A failed semblance. Now the man is also in a fur coat, a black, pitch black one. An old black tomcat and his yellow domestic tigerish cat cornered. Sticking by their proverbial cunning, they dare not even bristle in the face of imminent danger.

Someone addresses them from aside, as if reading. A male voice, whose tone wishes to remain objective, spits out the word executate. The old man reacts to this by straightening his back and swallowing his saliva. He grabs the edge of his fur coat and makes a move like he wants to button up, but he doesn’t. Any changes on the woman are visible only to those who really immerse themselves in the picture. She stays stiff for a moment. She doesn’t breathe. She taps the back of her right hand with her left forefinger a couple of times. He reacts, though. The corners of his mouth slant downward, he gives a weird smile. The smile of anti-matter. He rises even more. He starts to talk. To talk loudly. He recalls having been listened to. Every single word he uttered. Every syllable. Shouting out, he tries to evoke those memories in the other present company as well.

But only ghosts are present.

The old man exclaims incomprehensible sentences. The rhythm is simple, repetitive, two-one-one-two, then all over again. He signals each auditory and probably semantic climax by raising his hand, and he concludes each auditory and probably semantic thesis by abruptly lowering his hand. There’s nine of those raisings and lowerings. The ninth lowering turns into a strong blow on the table surface. At the same time, this puts an end to the memory of his power. The last try. His lips reassume an invisible smile of fear.

Her eyebrows hang low. Their lowness is so dominant that the tired eyes are hardly noticeable. As if she is trying to tell him something with her composure – There’s no hope. Don’t you see it’s all over. Then she realizes it’s all right for her to give him the pleasure of the last twitch of consciousness. Seemingly uninterested she bites her lower lip, then she licks it all over. A flicker of tragicomedy in this sight. Her beige purse suddenly finds its place on the table, but remains marginalized in front of the audience. As if nobody wonders what’s inside. The purse has no role at all. Chekov’s rule does not hold true for this performance.

His instinct of self-preservation still leads his words. No – can be discerned from time to time. No.

He raises his finger. He waves it, then points it at someone. Following this direction leads us toward